Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to Hell in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.